4.0 Upgrade makes ALL plugins disappear

Please share the solution, there’s multiple users with the issue.

I followed the suggestions above (sort of). I had to completely reinstall one-by-one each and every plugin I use because the WordPress product would not read the directory. It’s the reason I turned off auto-updating, and it continues to be a problem.

After installing all my plugins again, I did a long listing of the subdirectories and produced a hash of the new plugins against the old plugins and it is identical. This is a WordPress problem.

My hunch is that during the upgrade procedure, the installer either does not read that directory or somehow skips the process to catalogue existing plugins and populate the plugins page (regardless of everyone’s attempts to help here, I still believe this to be the case). Once the upgrade process completes, it just never looks again.

As I said above, the directories, subdirectories, and all associated hidden files are owned by the web server user and are sporting a UMASK of 022 (0644 for files and 0755 for directories) and WordPress refuses to read the directory. However, installing a new plugin into the very same directory gets read while all pre-existing plugins get ignored.

There is no solution other than to do all your work again.

@cvquesty Can you look in your error logs for possible errors during the update? If you find any, please post them here!

None at all! In fact, my error logs are quite clean. I’ve got LogStash + Elastic Search pointed at them, and I’ve had no unexpected events in almost a month.

I can’t even see my list of plugins!

I tried changing my theme to the WP default ones, 2012 and 2013 and still can’t see the plugins. And they don’t work at all. It’s like they are totally disabled.

SEO by Yoast
all in one favicon
Wordfence Security
Limit login attempts
Contact Form 7
Really Simple CAPTCHA
UpdraftPlus
Social Media Feather
JetPack & Akismet
TinyMCE Advanced
Zemanta

I’m sure there are others, but I know these were in there.

What’s an easy way to revert back to 3.9 without reinstalling EVERYTHING? I recently had to do that because of a hack. All was running smoothly till 4.0. ??

Here are my plugins:

Akismet
All in One WP Security
AP HTML5 Audio Player
Captain Slider
Easy FancyBox
Easy Random Quotes
eStore Wysija Newsletter Addon
Gantry Template Framework
Image Mouseover
jQuery Vertical Scroller
MCE Table Buttons
Media File Manager
Post UI Tabs
MP3-jPlayer
Simple Share Buttons Addon
Simple Slideshow Manager
UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
WP eStore
WYSIWYG Widgets/Widget Blocks

I am in the same boat as giselleaz. All of mine are gone, but I cannot even reinstall them. I get this…

Installing Plugin: Akismet 3.0.2
Downloading install package from https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/akismet.3.0.2.zip…

Unpacking the package…

Installing the plugin…

Destination folder already exists. /home/content/g/i/a/giantsfoot/html/wp-content/plugins/akismet/

Plugin install failed.

I am not an IT guy, so I have a funny feeling this is going to be costly and screw me pretty hard. I did back up to Dropbox before upgrading, at least. Not that I would know what to do with the backed up files.

Yeah… you have to completely remove them from disk before reinstalling them. They live at:

$DOCUMENT_ROOT/wp_content/plugins/<plugin_name>

@bryak – had the same message. If you can FTP into your WP folders you might try to rename the plugin folder (I simply add the number “2” to the end of the plugin folder name) and then go back to WP dashboard > plugins, and try to reinstall that plugin.
That should get rid of the “folder already exists” message because technically, the folder with that exact name does not exist.

@cvquesty – does deleting the entire plugin folder delete any of it’s table data? When I renamed the folder and reinstalled, the parts of the plugin that showed as errors on the website began to work properly before. I’m just worried that if I delete the folder entirely it will delete any specific settings or data that are needed for the plugin’s effect on my pages or posts. Can you confirm before I muster the courage to delete them all?

@redgar – Thanks, that’s way safer than just deleting. I am always hesitant to tinker.

Overall I should compliment all of you on how beautiful you look today. Everything looks fixed! Thanks so much.

Adding a ‘2’ to the end of the files in FTP and reinstalling each plugin worked and all of the old settings are there.

For those having the issue, can you post a list with your plugins? I’m curious if there is a security plugin, a dashboard customizer or something related to an plugin updater, that you all may have in common.

I would say that the sites having this problem above have been hacked and its just a coincidence that when you upgraded your versions the plugins disappeared.

I have had this same problem on about 6 of my sites and when you log into the admin area the plugins all disappear. Using FTP you can see them all in the plug in folder.

The way I have been fixing it is as above. Underscore or rename the plugin then reinstall it. DONT FORGET TO DELETE THE UNDERSCORED PLUGINS. If you look into the files you will see all the code that the hackers have installed.

I have been looking for a more efficient and faster fix to this problem but am yet to come up with one.

I have installed Advanced Automatic Updater and Wordfence plugins to my sites and the alert emails I receive all day everyday of hackers trying to hack in is very concerning.

I hope someone can offer a quicker fix to this problem.

Yes, I was hacked into a couple of months ago, but I deleted all those files and I reinstalled in a new directory with backups that were months old.

I don’t see the connection with having been hacked.

@justpurple – “If you look into the files you will see all the code that the hackers have installed.”

Could you elaborate on this a bit more? What code might we look into and verify if we’ve been hacked?

if you have shell access and do an ls -altr you will get an output like so:

drwxr-xr-x 4 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:16 akismet
drwxr-xr-x 7 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:17 captcha
drwxr-xr-x 8 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:18 backupwordpress
drwxr-xr-x 5 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:22 code-snippet-library
drwxr-xr-x 3 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:22 facebook-publish
drwxr-xr-x 8 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:23 jetpack
drwxr-xr-x 3 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:26 regenerate-thumbnails
drwxr-xr-x 9 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:27 wordpress-seo
drwxr-xr-x 9 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:28 wp-google-maps
drwxr-xr-x 4 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:28 wp-pagenavi
drwxr-xr-x 10 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:29 ..
drwxr-xr-x 13 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 apache apache 4096 Sep 16 22:29 publish-to-twitter

This will show you the modify dates from oldest to newest and you can see when the files have been modified. If you need a deeper understanding of the directory tree, you can use the “tree” command:

tree -pug

.
├── [drwxr-xr-x apache apache ] akismet
│?? ├── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] akismet.php
│?? ├── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] class.akismet-admin.php
│?? ├── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] class.akismet.php
│?? ├── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] class.akismet-widget.php
│?? ├── [drwxr-xr-x apache apache ] _inc
│?? │?? ├── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] akismet.css
│?? │?? ├── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] akismet.js
│?? │?? ├── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] form.js
│?? │?? └── [drwxr-xr-x apache apache ] img
│?? │?? └── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] logo-full-2x.png
│?? ├── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] index.php
│?? ├── [-rw-r–r– apache apache ] readme.txt
│?? ├── [drwxr-xr-x apache apache ] views

and this goes on for 1726 lines… I’ll spare you the details. In any event, it tells you owner, group, and permissions on each file in the hierarchy where it sits, and lets you know if anything isn’t as it should be.

Never listen to anyone crying wolf without checking it out for yourself first. That’s good advice on any online support forum, but I’ve found to be even more true on www.ads-software.com.